Insomnia

I talk to them at 3am, my children,
I tell them about the Doomsday Vault 
in Svalbard, how it’s beset by melting 
permafrost; I talk about the hairy frogfish, the predator-
prey cycle of life, how humans keep birds 
in cages, and how travel to Proxima Centauri b
would take them 6,300 years, a little cosmic 
joke, ha ha; I explain that the gang-rape of a mother 
in Kyiv next to her child and dead husband is called
collateral damage, that the weight of a butterfly 
of uranium destroyed Hiroshima, and that no single wild species
depends for its survival on the Freak Show 
that is the Human Race; I tell them that we fail 
to learn from human history and how they are blessed 
never to have been born.

©️2022 K Price

Country Churches

Astride the KTM beast, we ride
the country roads of New England, passing mini
country churches not big enough to swing
an axe (other than the verbal kind). At the crossroads
in one hamlet, there are two, along with a pub
and a servo, and I wonder if on Sundays
the population of around 150 evenly splits
itself between the green fibro Catholic and the beige fibro
Anglican House of God diagonally opposite. Or do the agnostics
and atheists muddy the holy water? Truth is
I’ve never seen any flock
to attendance, so who goes there? The farmers
praying for rain? The fossickers praying
for that nugget, the alcoholics praying for forgiveness
for beating their wives and children senseless after one
too many at the public house on a Friday night?
Or are these houses of worship mere relics
of the past along with the town’s faith
on account of all that flood, fire
and filicide?

©️2020 K Price

Isadora

I’m riding pillion on the KTM beast
when our silhouette on the damp bitumen paints my scarf flying
like a Siamese fighter’s tailfin in the slipstream

and I think of you
Isadora

and wonder if in that nano-second that the forces of the universe conspired
to smash you into the cobblestones of the Riviera
you had a chance to think:

How absurd!

I tuck in the delinquent ends
I wouldn’t want your spectacular end
to be in vain.

©️2020 K Price

Look Up

Concealed in the sameness
the faded blue suit
Clark Kent by day
Who cares, who cares to look?

But out there
when darkness falls
it’s kite-flying breathtaking riddles
out of dayshadows, an infinite teasing
of zetetic minds
unphysics exploding:

The Universe –
ultimate mystery man.

Evocation of Art

‘Anti-mimesis is a philosophical position that holds the direct opposite of mimesis. Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. In the essay, written as a Platonic dialogue, Wilde holds that anti-mimesis “results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.”.

What is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art. As in an example posited by Wilde, although there has been fog in London for centuries, one notices the beauty and wonder of the fog because “poets and painters have taught the loveliness of such effects…They did not exist till Art had invented them.” ‘                                 Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imitating_art

 

Nature creates art in the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver

I don’t agree with Mr Wilde; surely the fact that artists painted the fog is because they saw its beauty in life, and thus art imitated life in this case (chicken vs egg). But I concede that art provides us ways of seeing and appreciating life from a number of different perspectives which we may not otherwise notice.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Humanity

Powered by Mysterious Blobs of Jelly

For more entries to last week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

A Week in Reflection

There was a time, when I was much younger, when I was afraid to fly.

No more.

I’m not sure why the change, but since a few decades ago, no longer do I sit white-knuckled in the belly of those big mechanical birds as they defy gravity. Perhaps it’s something to do with my attitude to death. I’m no nihilist, but I don’t necessarily view death in a negative light. My death, that is. The death of others is quite another matter.

The morning after MH17 was shot down, I flew long-haul. I thought not of plane crashes but of the shocking consequences of war, its terrible futility and the immense trauma and devastation that it invariably causes to human lives; of those people left behind, forever suffering the reality of the obliteration of their loved ones. And how this suffering so often leads to an ongoing cycle of violence.

In my hotel room, on the BBC News channel, night after night, images of the crash site alternated with sickening images of Gaza. How to make sense of the human that strolls casually amongst the mutilated dead, picking through aircraft wreckage and strewn personal belongings as if he were evaluating fruit at the local market. And of the human that bombs sleeping children as if crop-spraying pests. How do we get to this?

A week later, on my way to Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport for my flight home, my hosts, who insisted on accompanying me in the taxi to the airport, chatted with the taxi-driver in Vietnamese. I heard the word “Malaysia” and asked if they were talking about plane crashes. They were. And they expressed their alarm that there had been three in one week. I thanked them for their tact, and we all laughed.

Once boarded, I started reading The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, and thoughts of the taxi conversation were forgotten as the book caused me to reflect on how human memory and the subconscious mind work both for and against us in life: the need for revenge versus the need for peace; how we dehumanize “the other side” to make ourselves feel better about what we do and about humanity as a whole; and how memories play a role in our undoing.

Eventually I slept but was bedeviled by catastrophic dreams – we ditched in the South China Sea, a flotilla of boats waiting to rescue us; we made an emergency landing in a busy city street, the fuel-laden left wing barely missing an advertising bollard; I rescued long-dead loved ones from a burning wreckage in a field of sunflowers..
.. the subconscious mind doing its best to exert control over that over which we have little.

Despite our best efforts, accidents happen; death happens.

But war does not just happen; it is made by humans, the likes of you and me.

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Between

We’ve had this one before, and I am studying for an exam, so a re-post this week. For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

Between

is the breath between
life and death,
the laughter between
the light and hereafter,
the whispers
between love and fractures.

Between
the glass reflections
float words consequential,
some, kind, reverential,
others, profane and mean,
drifting down, unseen,

on matchstick people
and their matchbox lives

us

breathing it in
like asbestos

Take care
with the words
between

——–bb

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Kant’s principle of respect for persons states that we should never use people as means to an end.

Kant obviously had no sense of humour.

This morning inside a train somewhere in Sydney

For more entries to this week’s, last week’s, the week before last’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: The World Through My Eyes

A long time ago I had an unpleasant experience which precipitated a few changes in direction, the most curious of which was in my reading tastes: almost overnight, a previously voracious appetite for serial-killer fiction evaporated and, in general, I no longer enjoyed reading fiction much at all. I’ve never worked out why–life is a strange journey. However, recently, I’ve had to read a lot of children’s literature for an elective study, and am surprised at how much enjoyment I’m getting from reading young adult fiction, in particular. And how much I’ve learnt from it–
about the world, about myself.

What we see in the world has the power to change what we read. And what we read has the power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.

How marvellous.

What have you read recently that has changed the way you see yourself?

See The Daily Post for more entries to this week’s photo challenge.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

Can you think of a once strongly held conviction, belief or ideology on which you have completely changed your position?

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Five favourites from this week’s photo challenge from The Daily Post.

Flickr Comments

Ohm Sweet Ohm

Lucid Gypsy

Delightfully Different Life

A Meditative Journey with Saldage

Weekly Photo Challenge: Colour

Skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, lip colour – of what consequence?

It’s the colour of the heart that matters.

I usually post links to my five favourites from the the Weekly Photo Challenge, but, this week, Allen Shores bewitched me with starlight…

Love’s Journey

Image via http://www.sxc.hu

We know
it’s our unclaimed baggage
at the station,

more than a few lockers full.

We don’t go there,
travel light,

well enough,
without it.

But impossible journeys
plague
our dreams.

Oxytocin: energy drink of the future?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

The wreck of the MV Sygna – Stockton Beach, NSW, Australia

What happiness is there for those who lead a solitary life through no choice of their own?

———————————-

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting Moment

The fleeting moment is epitomized in street photography – frames of an unchoreographed ballet of movement, expression, interaction and unguarded moments.

But street photography is also an ethical minefield; sometimes people seem comfortable with being photographed, but often, not so, as appears to be the case in the photo below, judging by the firemen’s expressions.

I suspect that these men are resigned to being constantly photographed by strangers, given the location, the nature of their work and the tributes painted on their fire engine. But perhaps they’re also disgusted by the whole disaster-tourism aspect of it.

What do you think?

Are you comfortable with being photographed in public places by strangers? If someone that you had photographed in the street voiced their objection, what would you do?

–x–

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Dilettantes of Disaster

Image via http://www.sxc.hu

The shadows draw long
through our limbs,
impoverished pulses from
indolent hearts carve us
tragic sinkholes for eyes; we are sallow
spectres in the night–
mirror, painting ourselves
in dishwater tincture
for dream-time, a sludge palette
of effete sorrow.

Until abstraction
manifests from the canvas
and chokes us by the throat,
we do not know gratitude.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Friendship

When you peer

through the looking-glass

of the artefacts of friendship,

do you know yourself?

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See the Daily Post for more entries to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Friendship

Chewing on this

Image via http://www.sxc.hu

I read this wonderful post of Kate Shrewsday’s
before going to sleep last night and it got me thinking (they always do)
of

Six impossible things before breakfast

A world without the power of money,
a sun-powered world

Journeys across a borderless globe,
Inter-universe journeys

Born old, growing young,
Spinal cords
growing in a window box

——-xx——-

Impossible possibilities? What are your thoughts? 😀

Platitude Pyre

Image via http://www.sxc.hu

I try to keep warm
in the memory of you

But within embered years
a cold truth lies
beneath aphoristic ashes –
“Time heals all wounds”,
“This too shall pass” –

Over my dead body, perhaps.